I feel like I'm going to get a ton of hate for this, but what I used to find helpful (and not to mention a creative alternative to Smogon**) when coming here is now filled with antiquated, low-effort, non-competitive, and in the case of many popular/older Pokemon, poor-advice movesets. Since these have a nature of constantly being updated, I think we should clean up a little. The purpose of searching these movesets, in most cases, should be to find a viable set, correct?

If we want to accomplish that goal for our users, we need to conduct a bit of housekeeping - either having the old ones which worked in the old games be edited for clarity that it's dated, or remove them. The date something was posted isn't necessarily enough, because mechanics on some of the posted information may have changed and the metagame in which it fits may be different, and that may not be immediately obvious to uninformed viewers (which we all know there are plenty of).

Even if I'm just whining/overreacting, here's my main point: does anyone else see the problem of a moveset answer from like the HGSS-BW era having upwards of 8 votes etc. at the very top, and thus misleading our new users who enter from search engines like Google? They're looking for recent, up-to-date advice on the Pokemon's current stance in the metagame. I'm just trying to improve the quality of our moveset pages.

** I believe it is possible to be creative and competitively viable, unlike Smogon.

@Lucario Because Pokemaster hasn’t had time for it, I guess.
@sunwun I don't really care that this has already been asked. It is fine to bring attention back to issues that have not been addressed properly, unless that floods the website.

@sumwun "Still, sometimes it is the inclination of players to rebel against the "accepted standard", for a multitude of reasons. Players find flaws, whether perceived or real, in the state of the OU metagame, and attempt to forge their own path, and develop their own designs based on their current knowledge. […] many times it results in an inferior design, an artifact of ignorance and poor planning. […] It is not the intent of the author to teach openmindedness and diplomacy"
- Smogon's Philosophy (I encourage you to read the full article; much like the community itself, the entire article is not like this, but this part does raise some eyebrows for me)

I'm personally somewhat neutral on Smogon, although I do think their presence in the Pokémon community as a whole is a net positive, since Smogon has developed a lot of very useful tools like Showdown (most obviously), and their standardized sets are quite useful, especially for newer players, but they do sometimes conduct themselves in a way that comes off as very elitist ("the wisdom of the accepted standard" is also a phrase used in that article), so I can certainly see how they alienate a lot of people.
To keep this thread from being derailed, it might be better to continue discussion of Smogon on user walls instead of here.

1 Answer

4 votes

We've had a few discussions about this kind of thing before, and it's hard to come up with a good solution. I don't think closing/hiding any questions would work, since people still play older gens, and some may still wish to contribute a set for that gen.

There are a few possibilities, some of which have been suggested before:

Create new moveset questions for Gen 8+ that would last several years. I guess this pretty much achieves what you're calling for - the current moveset questions wouldn't be closed but people would be suggested to use the new question. Probably the simplest one the achieve.

Create new moveset questions for every generation. Maybe starting from Gen 4 since there is not a huge call for multiple Gen 1 movesets for every Pokemon for example. But this could start clogging up Pokebase, and would require moving current answers across questions. Perhaps it could be split by "device" - GB/GBA (Gen 1-3) in one thread, DS (Gen 4-5), 3DS (Gen 6-7), etc.

Keep existing questions but mark every answer as a particular generation, and add a "filter" where you can choose a generation to view. It may be possible to order the questions by generation, so you'd have gen 7 movesets first, ordered by votes, then gen 6 ordered by votes etc. It wouldn't be simple to develop though. Also, as soon as someone posts a gen 8 moveset it's immediately at the top and looks like it's a better answer even if there are 10 better ones right below.

Create an entirely new section just for moveset questions (like we have Pokebase/Meta/RMT now). No one would be allowed to ask questions (besides MovesetBot), but everyone can answer them. This would make it easier to implement the second option above, each question is its own generation, and it would be easier to implement custom stuff like filters or answer templates. The current Pokebase questions can be redirected to the new site. One problem here (major or minor, depending on your viewpoint) is that everyone on Pokebase would lose all their points they gained through the moveset questions, though they'd regain them on the other site.

Incidentally, I have been considering for a while whether to change all moveset questions to be asked by MovesetBot, for consistency. That would mean a fair few users lose some points, but it's probably not a big deal.